


Exhale

by flamboyantgentleman



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Sadstuck, doomed timeline or something???, i warned you, really really sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamboyantgentleman/pseuds/flamboyantgentleman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You always said you’d follow him into the dark, but this dark is calling <i>his<i> name and not yours.</i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Exhale

**Author's Note:**

> because i like to torture myself

He’s dying.

He’s dying and his skin is beautiful, so beautiful and soft and you’ve never touched it quite the way you wanted to.

Still want to. (He’ll never belong to you now, will he?) But he’s fucking _dying_ and every second is another inch on the clock and they add up to the slowest, longest mile you’ve ever run and the worst part is that you already know there’s no light at the end of this tunnel.

And just about the time you reach that not-light everything slows down, and there’s no room for air in your lungs with the sudden realization that this is where you stop. You always said you’d follow him into the dark but this dark is calling _his_ name and not yours and you can’t think and you can’t feel and

suddenly

he laughs.

Laughs like dying is this big joke and he says, his voice laced with a sleepiness that slips too far under your skin, “You’re holding my hand, Dave.” He’s grinning, the kid is fucking _grinning _like he just won the lottery and, oh— _this___ is what it feels like when your heart breaks, this heat burning in your chest and prickling in your eyes and you hold on tighter because maybe you need it more than he does. There’s something intimate about the way his fingers curl into the spaces between yours, too warm, too real—but that laugh is a wheeze now and when he gulps down air like a diver surfacing, you know with something fierce in your heart that you don’t ever want to hear that exhale.

You’re frantic, pulse beating out _i’mnotreadypleasenothim_ and you look into his eyes and you watch the crescent moon lashes descend over the most beautiful shade of blue you’ve ever seen.

He doesn’t die with your name on his lips like they do in the movies, and somehow it’s sweeter that way. His dying breath is soft like the hissing echo of guitar strings, soft like the hum of the ocean captured in a shell, and everything is the quietest kind of halcyon when those fingers still around yours.

He exhales, and the world begins again.


End file.
